My mother said dance is making something from nothing, that you use your body to stir the molecules, paint a picture on the air that then only lasts in memory. It was like when she once gave me a paintbrush and can of water and told me I could paint anything I wanted anywhere in the house. I painted the front porch, and then I painted the front door. I painted my name, and I painted a bird, wispy wings like a swan, like the many photos my mother had shown me of dancers, feathery circles moving in unison, like the ghostly ones all in white—the wilis, those restless creatures in “Giselle.” My mother told me the story before we saw a performance, and I cried for days thinking of her, a girl dead from a broken heart, and then all of the other girls, an epidemic of them rising from their graves to torment the men who had hurt them. We agreed that was the good part, they at least got a turn, but how tragic that they had to die to get there. I didn’t want to be one of them, these angry girls with their unrequited loves. I wanted to be Swanhilda in “Coppélia”; I wanted laughter and comedy and happily ever after.

My mother once told me Anna Pavlova’s dying request was to hold her swan costume and that her last words were “Play that measure very softly.” In a performance right after her death, a single spotlight marked the stage where she should have been dancing. My father asked why she was always filling my head with such sad things. We were in their bedroom, sitting on the bed, my mother trying once again to teach me how to make a French knot in the pillowcase she was letting me embroider, and she just shook her head, a needle threaded with pale-pink floss in her hand, and she told him he knew nothing about romance, that ballet is full of the heartbreak of romance: “Giselle” and “Petrushka” and “Swan Lake.”

“Good night, Lilliput,” my mother said, and then she said something to my father, who was seated in his chair, listening to the radio, as he usually was that time of day. And then she was gone from our lives.

My mother had said she was teaching a dance lesson that night, something she had been doing for a couple of years. She didn’t say a private client; she didn’t say in a nightclub. She said, “Good night, Lilliput.” Then she said, “See ya, dope,” or did she say, “I can’t cope,” or, “I have no hope,” or, “Not me, nope”? I once asked my father what she’d said to him, and he said he couldn’t recall, that he didn’t remember her saying anything other than “Leave the light on,” which was what she always said.